Icaria

@brads_beard: "Say what you will about Destiny but it wasn't still a broken unplayable mess 6 months after release."

Just an empty shell of a game that was not what either the players or devs had hoped it to be?

@joshwent: "I've been associated with a few projects myself where one of the leads becomes discouraged with something, and, rather than withdrawing gracefully, drags the entire thing into the gutter with them."

I can appreciate the 'fuck it, burn it all down' mentality but it's not clear that this was the case. Someone afraid they're about to get sacked might start procrastinating in this manner too. The longer the job remains unfinished, the longer you're needed. Still, it's preferable to assume he was deliberately torching the office in defiance, rather than just desperately clinging on to a workplace that turned in to a shithole.

@amirite: Cool armchair psych, bro but we don't need to treat 'creatives' as a special class of people.

Bought a Razer mouse and it was terrible. Worked on almost no surface in the house, forced you to sign up to an online service just to assign a couple of buttons (that didn't work well any way), and it broke in under a year. Am now using a mouse that cost one third what the Razer did, a g300, and it's the best mouse I've ever owned. I should really get around to stockpiling a few spares.

So yeah, Razer and OUYA seems like a match made in heaven. May they enjoy many years of duping unsuspecting schmucks together.

Still haven't finished KOTOR2. The game was so buggy it made me long for the polish of a Bethesda game. After twice losing hours of progress due to broken scripting that slowly snowballed in to an unfinishable mess and constantly running back and forth in dungeons to retrieve NPC companions that got stuck on every bit of geometry, I gave up on the game.

I assume I'm part of the target demographic for this kind of stuff (may be wrong, usually am; am also old) but I can barely watch the majority of the free stuff GB has to offer. Between GB, the various 'long plays' and 'lets plays' already on Youtube proper, Twitch, and Steam's Broadcasts feature, it seems like a saturated market. I have to wonder if this is less about Google making money from this service and more about stopping Twitch/Amazon from making money.

Someone wake me when the reviews are out and I know whether to begrudgingly give my money to Facebook or to begrudgingly give my money to Valve. I'm guessing the OR will have a slightly better quality screen due to years of R&D on latency and optics and the Vive will only work with Steam games or something stupid like that.

If they make a game that controls well and isn't bullshit punishing, I might be interested. Love the genre but was never hot on Castlevania. Have been playing Circle of the Moon while waiting for Axiom Verge to come to PC and they seemed to iterate upon Castlevania's mechanics very little between '87 and 2001. More poorly-explained stats and a card system for switching whips but still with the same movement/knockback/staggering, infinitely respawning enemies (without even leaving the room), inability to aim up, and fuck-off frustrating late game from the 80s. In 2001, they were still struggling to catch up to 94's Super Metroid.

I often enjoy it in multiplayer games when there's a wide gamut of skill levels. Give me five people around my skill level for interesting fights, another five people to serve as cannon fodder so that I can trick my brain in to thinking I've achieved something, and one person who is just fuck-off good that you spend the match trying to get your head around, and I'm usually having fun.

Give me a server full of people at my skill level and we're all just spinning our wheels, a stalemate without much in the way of hard swings. Every inch of progress is exhausting. Nothing crazy ever happens. At that point, I might as well go outside since life is equally unfulfilling, mundane, and laborious.

I'd be up for a remake or spiritual sequel to Spyro 3. The first two games were a little lacking in variety; 3 added a bunch of different playable characters, a lot of bosses, and they even chucked half of a Tony Hawk game in there for the hell of it.

@themasterds: I get the feeling a deep, abiding appreciation of Banjo's lore is a lot like finding religion: you already have to be sold on it before it starts to look good to you.

As for the gameplay, I realise I'm in the minority here but I don't think there was a single N64 platformer that played well, SM64 included. Spyro on the PSX was the only 3D platformer of that entire generation that didn't feel like your character was wading through molasses and/or one second from leaping off of the map the entire game. Most of those games fell in to either of categories 'glorified 2D platformer a la Crash Bandicoot' or 'glorified unfocussed tech demo a la Body Harvest'. It really wasn't until Super Mario Sunshine (camera issues aside) and Ratchet and Clank (from the same dev as Spyro, IIRC) that 3D platformers regularly became half-way playable.

As for the art, all I saw back then and all I see now is diabetes. Rare's stuff always looked like a knock-off of already sickly sweet 90's era Disney cartoons like Tale Spin. The sheer amount of churn Rare were responsible for in the 90's (between five-ish DKC/DKL games in two years and four superficially different 3D platformers in three-ish years, it's a wonder Rare didn't single-handedly kill both genres) certainly didn't help with the sense of exploitation and creative bankruptcy.